Soviet Union

RECONSTRUCTION AND COLD WAR

Reconstruction Years

Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, its
economy had been devastated in the struggle. Roughly a quarter of
the country's capital resources had been destroyed, and industrial
and agricultural output in 1945 fell far short of prewar levels. To
help rebuild the country, the Soviet government obtained limited
credits from Britain and Sweden but refused economic assistance
proposed by the United States under the Marshall Plan. Instead, the
Soviet Union compelled Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to supply
machinery and raw materials. Germany and former Nazi satellites
(including Finland) made reparations to the Soviet Union. The
Soviet people bore much of the cost of rebuilding because the
reconstruction program emphasized heavy industry while neglecting
agriculture and consumer goods. By the time of Stalin's death in
1953, steel production was twice its 1940 level, but the production
of many consumer goods and foodstuffs was lower than it had been in
the late 1920s.

During the postwar reconstruction period, Stalin tightened
domestic controls, justifying the repression by playing up the
threat of war with the West. Many repatriated Soviet citizens who
had lived abroad during the war, whether as prisoners of war,
forced laborers, or defectors, were executed or sent to prison
camps. The limited freedoms granted in wartime to the church and to
collective farmers were revoked. The party tightened its admission
standards and purged many who had become party members during the
war.

In 1946 Andrei Zhdanov, a close associate of Stalin, helped
launch an ideological campaign designed to demonstrate the
superiority of socialism over capitalism in all fields. This
campaign, colloquially known as the Zhdanovshchina ("era of
Zhdanov"), attacked writers, composers, economists, historians, and
scientists whose work allegedly manifested Western influence.
Although Zhdanov died in 1948, the cultural purge continued for
several years afterward, stifling Soviet intellectual development.
Another campaign, related to the Zhdanovshchina, lauded the real or
purported achievements of past and present Russian inventors and
scientists. In this intellectual climate, the genetic theories of
biologist Trofim D. Lysenko, which were supposedly derived from
Marxist principles but lacked scientific bases, were imposed upon
Soviet science to the detriment of research and agricultural
development. The anticosmopolitan trends of these years adversely
affected Jewish cultural and scientific figures in particular. In
general, a pronounced sense of Russian nationalism, as opposed to
socialist consciousness, pervaded Soviet society.